David Bowie: First To Embrace The Internet

UNITED KINGDOM - JUNE 01: WEMBLEY ARENA Photo of David BOWIE, performing live onstage on Serious Moonlight tour (Photo by Phil Dent/Redferns)

David Bowie not only reinvented himself numerous times throughout his career both musically and visually he was ahead of the curve when it came to the business side of the music industry.

One of the first artists to adapt to the Internet, he told the New York Times in 2002 that “music itself is going to become like running water or electricity… I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”

Copyrights still exist, although the laws keep changing. And though the record industry is nothing like it used to be, Bowie’s new album, Blackstar, was released by Columbia Records.

And in a bit of irony, though Bowie was one of the first artists with his own Internet service provider / fan club, Bowienet — DavidBowie.com — there is no mention of his passing on the site.